When Marie-Jose Zuurbier and Tess Town-send’s local am dram club went into lock-down, they got busy writing a series of virtual plays for performance on Zoom.
These 30-minute follow the fictitious Watsons Amateur Theatre Club rehearsing plays, fund-raising, providing the town with entertainment and now trying to decide how to celebrate Christmas.
The clever scripts capture the challenges of the pandemic, the ever-changing rules govern-ing theatre visits and the strange foibles of Zoom we have grown to love. Loneliness, domestic tension, denial, panic, laziness and ignoring the rules all get an airing alongside some chortling good humour as each well drawn character hilariously reflects an aspect of how we are reacting to these strange times.
“The glorious new words – bubble, furlough, lockdown, social distance, and some govern-ment buzz phrases – get built into our scripts without becoming too political. We wonder if the plays might be seen as the 2020 version of Anne Frank’s Diaries, recording a time in history when everything became so different!” says Tess
The pair wanted to raise money for actors and crew affected by venue closures and decided to give the scripts away in exchange for a do-nation to the Actors Benevolent Fund, a chari-ty providing help for individuals experiencing financial hardship.
“To date 92 groups have asked for copies of the royalty free scripts and several have post-ed videos of their efforts on our facebook page. Best of all we have just won Best En-semble Piece for the first play, against some stiff competition!” adds Marie- José, who also scooped Best Director.
Zoom, A Play for Lockdown is up on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=kDueUUp1Cm8&t=25s The Sequel, The Second Wave is up on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=RzbgOh530Dk The Trequel, A New Normal is up on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=y78R7cE-K1o&t=28s
The Christmas Special, Herd Ingenuity , will be released on YouTube shortly, so forget the TV repeats and enjoy something fresh and new from this intrepid pair. Its free, its funny and its local!